The next week Franklin launched a series of classic essays signed “Busy-Body,” which Bradford published on his front page with a large byline. Franklin wrote at least four on his own and two others in part before turning the series over to fellow Junto member Joseph Breintnall. “By this means the attention of the public was fixed on that paper, and Keimer’s proposals, which we burlesqued and ridiculed, were disregarded.”9
The Busy-Body began by cleverly establishing the inadequacies of Bradford’s paper (“frequently very dull”) and declaring his intention to make it (at least temporarily) better. He would do so by being a scold and tattle, in the tradition of the character Isaac Bickerstaff that the English essayist Richard Steele had created, thus adding gossip columnist to the list of Franklin’s American firsts. He readily admitted that much of this was “nobody’s business,” but “out of zeal for the public good,” he volunteered “to take nobody’s business wholly into my own hands.” Some might find themselves offended, he warned. Yet, he pointed out what was, and is, the basic appeal of gossip: “As most people delight in censure when they themselves are not the objects of it, if any are offended at my publicly exposing their private vices, I promise they shall have the satisfaction, in a very little time, of seeing their good friends and neighbors in the same circumstances.”
Keimer responded with a fusty admonition that the Busy-Body series might initially raise for readers of Bradford’s paper the “expectation that they would now have some entertainment for their money,” but they would soon feel “a secret grief to see the reputation of their neighbors blasted.” When the Busy-Body merrily continued to publish his barbs, the excitable Keimer became more shrill. He responded with limp doggerel: “You hinted at me in your paper. Which now has made me draw my rapier. With scornful eye, I see your hate. And pity your unhappy fate.” He paired this with a convoluted tale called “Hue and Cry after the Busy-Body,” portraying Franklin and Breintnall as a two-headed monster, with Franklin described as “every Ape’s epitome…as threadbare as his great coat, and skull as thick as his shoe soles.”10
Keimer thus became one of Franklin’s first outspoken foes. The betrayal, the press war, the dueling essays would all be repeated a decade later when Franklin and Bradford each decided to start magazines.
Sadly for those who enjoy titillation, the Busy-Body essays in fact failed to deliver much gossip. Instead, they tended to be clever tales with thinly disguised real-life counterparts (in one instance, a reader took the effort to publish a key to whom each character referred). Franklin employed what is now a standard disingenuous disclaimer: “If any bad characters happen to be drawn in the course of these papers, they mean no particular person.”
The final Busy-Body that was mainly written by Franklin made fun of treasure seekers who used divining rods and dug up the woods looking for buried pirate loot. “Men otherwise of very good sense have been drawn into this practice through an overweening desire of sudden wealth,” he wrote, “while the rational and almost certain methods of acquiring riches by industry and frugality are neglected.” The fable, an attack on the get-rich-quick schemes of the time, went on to preach Franklin’s favorite theme: slow and steady diligence is the true way to wealth. He ended by quoting what his imaginary friend Agricola said on giving his son a parcel of land: “I assure thee I have found a considerable quantity of gold by digging there; thee mayst do the same. But thee must carefully observe this, Never to dig more than plow deep.”
The essay had a second half that advocated more paper currency for Pennsylvania. Franklin wrote most of it, with a small section written by Breintnall. Franklin implied that those who opposed more paper currency were trying to protect their own financial interests, though he of course had his own financial interest in the approval of more printing work. He also launched the first of what would be many attacks on the province’s Proprietors, the Penn family, and their appointed governor, by implying that they were trying to make the bulk of Pennsylvania’s residents “their tenants and vassals.” This ending was deleted in most editions of Bradford’s newspaper, perhaps because Bradford was allied with the Penn family and their party.11
Another reason for pulling back the snide section on paper currency was that Franklin had produced a far more thoughtful essay on the subject, which he discussed in the Junto and published as a pamphlet the following week. “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency” was Franklin’s first serious analysis of public policy, and it holds up a lot better than his metaphysical musings on religion. Money was a concept he had a solid feel for, unlike theological abstractions.
Franklin argued that the lack of enough currency caused interest rates to rise, kept wages low, and increased dependence on imports. Creditors and big landowners opposed an increase in currency for selfish reasons, he charged, but “those who are lovers of trade and delight to see manufactures encouraged will be for having a large addition to our currency.” Franklin’s key insight was that hard currency, such as silver and gold, was not the true measure of a nation’s wealth: “The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of silver and gold they possess.”
The essay was very popular, except among the wealthy, and it helped to persuade the legislature to adopt the proposed increase in paper currency. Although Bradford got the first commission to print some of the money, Franklin was given the next round of work. In the spirit of what Poor Richard would call “doing well by doing good,” Franklin was not averse to mingling his private interests with his public ones. His friends in the legislature, “who considered I had been of some service, thought it fit to reward me by employing me in printing the money—a very profitable job and a great help to me. This was another advantage gained by my being able to write.”12
The Pennsylvania Gazette
Franklin’s scheme to put Keimer out of business, which was aided by the quirky printer’s own incompetence and inability to ignore barbs, soon succeeded. He fell into debt, was briefly imprisoned, fled to Barbados, and as he was leaving sold his newspaper to Franklin. Jettisoning the serialized encyclopedia and part of the paper’s unwieldy name, Franklin became the proud publisher of The Pennsylvania Gazette in October 1729. In his first letter to his readers, he announced that “there are many who have long desired to see a good newspaper in Pennsylvania,” thus taking a poke at both Keimer and Bradford.13
There are many types of newspaper editors. Some are crusading ideologues who are blessed with strong opinions, partisan passions, or a desire to challenge authority. Benjamin’s brother James was in this category. Some are the opposite: they like power and their proximity to it, and are comfortable with the established order and feel vested in it. Franklin’s Philadelphia competitor Andrew Bradford was such.
And then there are those who are charmed and amused by the world and delight in charming and amusing others. They tend to be skeptical of both orthodoxies and heresies, and they are earnest in their desire to seek truth and promote public betterment (as well as sell papers). There fits Franklin. He was graced—and afflicted—with the trait so common to journalists, especially ones who have read Swift and Addison once too often, of wanting to participate in the world while also remaining a detached observer. As a journalist he could step out of a scene, even one that passionately engaged him, and comment on it, or on himself, with a droll irony. The depths of his beliefs were often concealed by his knack for engaging in a knowing wink.
Like most other newspapers of the time, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette was filled not only with short news items and reports on public events, but also with amusing essays and letters from readers. What made his paper a delight was its wealth of this type of correspondence, much of it written under pseudonyms by Franklin himself. This gimmick of writing as if from a reader gave Franklin more leeway to poke fun at rivals, revel in gossip, circumvent his personal pledge to speak ill of no one, and test-drive his evolving philos
ophies.
In a classic canny maneuver, Franklin corrected an early typo—he had reported that someone “died” at a restaurant when he meant to say “dined” at it—by composing a letter from a fictitious “J.T.” who discoursed on other amusing misprints. For example, one edition of the Bible quoted David as saying he was “wonderfully mad” rather than “made,” which caused an “ignorant preacher to harangue his audience for half an hour on the subject of spiritual madness.” Franklin then went on (under the guise of J.T.) to praise Franklin’s own paper, point out a similar typo made by his rival Bradford, criticize Bradford for being generally sloppier, and (with delicious irony) praise Franklin for not criticizing Bradford: “Your paper is most commonly very correct, and yet you were never known to triumph upon it by publicly ridiculing and exposing the continual blunders of your contemporary.” Franklin even turned his false modesty into a maxim to forgive his typo: “Whoever accustoms himself to pass over in silence the faults of his neighbors shall meet with much better quarter from the world when he happens to fall into a mistake himself.”14
The Franklin–Bradford newspaper war also included disputes over scoops and stolen stories. “When Mr. Bradford publishes after us,” Franklin wrote in one editor’s note, “and has occasion to take an Article or two out of the Gazette, which he is always welcome to do, he is desired not to date his paper a day before ours lest readers should imagine we take from him, which we always carefully avoid.”
Their competition had been going on for a year when Franklin set out to win from Bradford the job of being the official printer for the Pennsylvania Assembly. He had already begun cultivating some of the members, especially those in the faction that resisted the power of the Penn family and its upper-crust supporters. After Bradford printed the governor’s address to the Assembly in a “coarse and blundering manner,” Franklin saw his opening. He printed the same message “elegantly and correctly,” as he put it, and sent it to each of the members. “It strengthened the hands of our friends in the House,” Franklin later recalled, “and they voted us their printers.”15
Even as he became more political, Franklin resisted making his newspaper fiercely partisan. He expressed his credo as a publisher in a famous Gazette editorial “Apology for Printers,” which remains one of the best and most forceful defenses of a free press.
The opinions people have, Franklin wrote, are “almost as various as their faces.” The job of printers is to allow people to express these differing opinions. “There would be very little printed,” he noted, if publishers produced only things that offended nobody. At stake was the virtue of free expression, and Franklin summed up the Enlightenment position in a sentence that is now framed on newsroom walls: “Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
“It is unreasonable to imagine that printers approve of everything they print,” he went on to argue. “It is likewise unreasonable what some assert, That printers ought not to print anything but what they approve; since…an end would thereby be put to free writing, and the world would afterwards have nothing to read but what happened to be the opinions of printers.”
With a wry touch, he reminded his readers that publishers are in business both to make money and inform the public. “Hence they cheerfully service all contending writers that pay them well,” even if they don’t agree with the writers’ opinions. “If all people of different opinions in this province would engage to give me as much for not printing things they don’t like as I could get by printing them, I should probably live a very easy life; and if all printers everywhere were so dealt by, there would be very little printed.”
It was not in Franklin’s nature, however, to be dogmatic or extreme about any principle; he generally gravitated toward a sensible balance. The rights of printers, he realized, were balanced by their duty to be responsible. Thus, even though printers should be free to publish offensive opinions, they should generally exercise discretion. “I myself have constantly refused to print anything that might countenance vice or promote immorality, though…I might have got much money. I have also always refused to print such things as might do real injury to any person.”
One such example involved a customer who asked the young printer to publish a piece in the Gazette that Franklin found “scurrilous and defamatory.” In his effort to decide whether he should take the customer’s money even though it violated his principles, Franklin subjected himself to the following test:
To determine whether I should publish it or not, I went home in the evening, purchased a twopenny loaf at the baker’s, and with the water from the pump made my supper; I then wrapped myself up in my great-coat, and laid down on the floor and slept till morning, when, on another loaf and a mug of water, I made my breakfast. From this regimen I feel no inconvenience whatever. Finding I can live in this manner, I have formed a determination never to prostitute my press to the purposes of corruption and abuse of this kind for the sake of gaining a more comfortable subsistence.
Franklin ended his “Apology for Printers” with a fable about a father and son traveling with a donkey. When the father rode and made his son walk, they were criticized by those they met; likewise, they were criticized when the son rode and made the father walk, or when they both rode the donkey, or when neither did. So finally, they decided to throw the donkey off a bridge. The moral, according to Franklin, was that it is foolish to try to avoid all criticism. Despite his “despair of pleasing everybody,” Franklin concluded, “I shall not burn my press or melt my letters.”16
Along with such high-minded principles, Franklin employed some more common strategies to push papers. One ever reliable method, which had particular appeal to the rather raunchy unmarried young publisher, was the time-honored truth that sex sells. Franklin’s Gazette was spiced with little leering and titillating items. In the issue a week after his “Apology for Printers,” for example, Franklin wrote about a husband who caught his wife in bed with a man named Stonecutter, tried to cut off the interloper’s head with a knife, but only wounded him. Franklin ends with a smirking pun about castration: “Some people admire that when the person offended had so fair and suitable opportunity, it did not enter his head to turn St-n-c-tt-r himself.”
The next issue had a similar short item about an amorous constable who had “made an agreement with a neighboring female to watch with her that night.” The constable makes the mistake of climbing into the window of a different woman, whose husband was in another room. Reported Franklin: “The good woman perceiving presently by the extraordinary fondness of her bedfellow that it could not possibly be her husband, made so much disturbance as to wake the good man, who finding somebody had got into his place without his leave began to lay about him unmercifully.”
And then there was the story of the sex-starved woman who wanted to divorce her husband because he could not satisfy her. She “at times industriously solicited most of the magistrates” to gain sympathy for her plight. After her husband was medically examined, however, she moved back in with him. “The report of the physicians (who in form examined his abilities and allowed him in every respect to be sufficient) gave her but small satisfaction,” Franklin wrote. “Whether any experiments more satisfactory have been tried, we cannot say; but it seems she now declares it as her opinion that ‘George is as good as de best.’ ” In another passing reference to sexual virility, which was also his first published notice of lightning, Franklin reported about a bolt that melted the pewter button on the pants of a young lad, adding: “ ’Tis well nothing else thereabouts was made of pewter.”
Writing as “The Casuist,” Franklin even helped to pioneer the genre of sexual and moral advice columns. (Although the literal definition of the word “casuistry” refers to the application of moral principles to everyday conduct, Franklin used it, with a touch of irony, i
n its more colloquial sense, which implies a slightly off-kilter or misleading application of those principles.) One letter from a reader, or from Franklin pretending to be a reader, posed the following dilemma: Suppose a person discovers that his wife has been seduced by his neighbor, and suppose he has reason to believe that if he reveals this to his neighbor’s wife, then she might agree to have sex with him, “is he justifiable in doing it?” Franklin, writing as the Casuist, gave an earnest answer. If the questioner were a Christian, he would know that he should “return not evil for evil, but repay evil with good.” And if he is not a Christian but instead “one who would make reason the rule of his actions,” he would come to the same conclusion: “such practices can produce no good to society.”17
Franklin also knew another maxim of journalism: crime stories sell, particularly when they are outlandish. In a report on the death of a young girl, for example, he provided the mix of reporting and outrage later perfected by racier tabloids. The case involved a couple who were charged with murdering the man’s daughter from a previous marriage by neglecting her, forcing her “to lie and rot in her nastiness,” giving her “her own excrements to eat,” and “turning her out of doors.” The child died, but a physician testified she would have died anyway from other ailments she had, so the judge sentenced the couple merely to be burned on the hand. Franklin raged at the “pathetic” ruling and delivered his own harsh verdict that the couple “had not only acted contrary to the particular law of all nations, but had even broken the universal law of nature.”18